Cisco, the leader in networking, is transforming how people connect and collaborate with social media. Cisco has paved the way for employees, customers, partners and visitors to view how we listen and engage via all social channels. Our new Social Media Listening Center is a state-of-the-art interactive experience featuring 6 touch-enabled screens showcasing real-time information about Cisco conversations in the social web. This will continue to enhance how we at Cisco integrate and interact with the voice of the customer as well as increase internal adoption of social media listening.

“We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.”

Epictetus Quote

Video and Photo by Davythe Dicochea

According to industry expert, Jeremiah Owyang, “the definition of a dedicated Social Media Engagement Center or Command Center is a physical space where companies coordinate to listen and engage their market in social channels to achieve business use cases in marketing engagement, customer care, risk management, or operational efficiency of coordination and contact center deflection.”

How will Cisco achieve this?

Cisco Interactive Experience Solution powers each visualization behind our Social Media Listening Center. This is managed in the cloud and is a Linux-based solution that has a proprietary Enterprise-grade browser allowing our data-rich visualizations to be loaded onto the screens. It is a powerful solution that provides reliability and 24×7 uptime.

What are we visualizing?

All screens are using either our own Cisco SocialMiner product or Radian6 for analytics

Social Media Customer Engagement

Highlighting CiscoLive conversations and engagement

Twitter-based global heat map

Where? Real-time global tweets are displayed

Social Media Influencers

Who? What influencers are tweeting about Cisco

Product Family Landscape

What conversations are happening around both Collaboration and the Data Center and Virtualization architectures

Social Media Word Cloud

Highlighting current trending topics

We have deployed several Social Media Listening Centers and configured and customized each for a specific purpose, including customer-facing, internal, and events social conversation monitoring. Our first listening center for the social media and digital marketing team was deployed in San Jose and created to monitor all Cisco and competitor conversations in order to identify opportunities to engage. Recent engagements have included assisting customers with their support inquiries, answering questions, and listening to feedback. The Social Media Listening Center deployed in the Executive Briefing Center is a customer-facing setup displaying general Cisco conversations and engagements. Additional listening centers have been deployed for events such as the London Olympics and the Collaboration Summit 2012, where conversations were monitored and visualized in real time.

How can you participate?

Join us via Facebook for a live streaming of this unveiling and send us your questions in advance or on that day.

Is your organization listening? Is a Listening Center on the horizon for you? How are you currently monitoring social conversations? We look forward to hearing how your organization is listening and engaging across social channels. Keep the conversation going and provide your comments below. #CiscoListens
This blog was written in collaboration with Bernadette Koscielniak and George Metrik. Stay tuned for additional blogs around #CiscoListens.

love this stuff. similar to one of our projects -- initial thought was to use the same touch screen panels you used here -- we ended up doing projector + touch enabled tablets. http://istrategylabs.com/2011/06/the-socialsphere-data-visualization-in-the-motor-city-of-germany/.
Thanks for the post!

A great initiative ,real positive feedback may funnel inward and disperse outwards when we massage these distinct part of all sorts of data real time , most importantly this gives an industry wide opportunity to listen to customer , partners and gives an added reachability to people , keeping them at the center of everything , either directly or in an indirect way - where meaningful information can be great value addition to every aspect in product making with priority to the constructive feedback is at the top of the agenda.
This is like adding a new type of sensitivity to the social elements and adhering to the open communication which is very fundamental to the DNA .
Great Job.

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